The Bitcoin network comprises numerous nodes, necessitating users to invest significant network requests and time in comprehending its network topology. In this paper, we propose a Bitcoin network topology discovery algorithm that utilizes lightweight probe nodes to facilitate rapid transmission of network protocols. Building upon this, we introduce a node layer clustering algorithm based on filtering stable network nodes, enabling parallel discovery of the network topology. Additionally, we present an adaptive method for dynamically displaying the layered structure of the network topology. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method reduces communication overhead by approximately 72.16% when achieving a 95% similarity in network topology. Furthermore, the algorithm is applicable for discovering the network topology in other blockchain networks with similar structures.
The Metaverse is an evolving technology that leverages the Internet infrastructure and the massively connected Internet of Everything (IoE) to create an immersive virtual world. In the Metaverse, humans engage in activities similar to those in the real world, such as socializing, working, attending events, exploring virtual landscapes, creating and trading digital assets, participating in virtual economies, and experiencing entertainment and cultural activities. By using advanced technologies such as IoE, extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and 6G communication, along with blockchain technology, the Metaverse bridges the physical and virtual worlds. In particular, Blockchain-Enabled IoE (BIoE) will play a crucial role in Metaverse applications by ensuring secure service provisioning through the integration of blockchain with IoE. It efficiently manages the massive connectivity of physical world objects and enhances security, integrity, and decentralization of trust, while increasing resilience against failures, thus securing and fostering trust in both physical and virtual Metaverse networks. While some view the Metaverse as a detached virtual world, technologies like mixed reality and digital twins highlight the need for complementarity and interactive co-existence between the physical and virtual worlds. Blockchain facilitates this co-existence by providing a secure and trusted framework for integrating and synchronizing data and activities across both environments, developing trust through the reliability and authenticity of interactions and transactions. However, despite substantial advancements in related fields, there remains a significant gap in comprehensive surveys that address the integration of AI/ML, 6G, and blockchain in the Metaverse. In this paper, we fill this gap by examining BIoE’s capabilities in bridging the physical and virtual worlds and securing Metaverse applications across various domains, such as immersive energy grids, immersive healthcare, and immersive living. We explore BIoE’s role in service provisioning in the Metaverse, including access control, privacy protection, authentication, attack identification, and trust management. Additionally, we present a detailed taxonomy of existing literature, discuss novel use cases, and explore the synergies and practical implementations of BIoE in Metaverse applications. Finally, we address current challenges and propose future research directions to advance the field of BIoE in the Metaverse.
Creating an immutable repository for vital robot and environmental data, ensuring long-term accessibility, and functioning in the absence of GPS or mapping are crucial for visual homing navigation systems. We focus on the intersection of blockchain and robotics, particularly in visual homing. Our research involves an in-depth analysis of various blockchain consensus mechanisms, highlighting their suitability for visual homing applications. The heart of blockchain functionality lies in its consensus mechanism, which facilitates agreement among network nodes. In our first study part, we conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis of key consensus algorithms, emphasizing visual homing’s decentralization, fault tolerance, latency, and throughput requirements. This analysis serves as a valuable reference for researchers and developers, emphasizing the importance of aligning the chosen consensus mechanism with specific blockchain application needs. The second part of our work involves extensive experiments exploring the connection between blockchain and visual homing. We assess prominent consensus mechanisms like Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), and Proof of Authority (PoA) within a virtual environment in Gazebo, leveraging wide area visual navigation (WAVN). Our research implementation is grounded in the ROS framework and the Gazebo simulation environment.
Human Unreadable, İnsan bedenini gizleyen üç perdelik, bedensel, long-form (uzun biçimli) algoritmik bir koreografidir. Blok zincir üzerine kayıtlı bu çalışma dans, kriptografi, mühendislik, insan-makine etkileşimi, yapay zekâ, makine öğrenmesi ve plastik sanatlara ilişkin birçok disiplini sentezleyen bir yapıya sahiptir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, Operator ikilisi tarafıdan gerçekleştirilmiş Human Unreadable örneği üzerinden algoritmik sanatın, blok zincir teknolojisindeki yerini ve yeni varolma biçimini ortaya koymak ve web3 sanatının yaratıcılık potansiyellerini tartışmaktır. Bu örnekte, blok zinciri teknolojisi hem çalışmanın konusunun (beden ve gizlilik) bir parçasıdır hem de çalışmanın formunu oluşturan temel araçlardan biri ve elbette sunuş biçimidir. Sonuç olarak bu çalışmada olduğu gibi blok zincir üzerine kayıtlı bazı algoritmik sanat çalışmalarının bu teknolojiyi sadece satış, sergileme ya da arşivleme amacıyla değil aynı zamanda konunun ve formun bir parçası haline gelme yani blok zincir teknolojisini yaratıcı bir medyum olarak kullanma özelliği taşıdığını ifade etmek mümkündür. Çalışma ile ilgili elde edilen tüm bulgular literatür bağlamında yorumlanmıştır.
In metaverse, digital assets are essential to define identity, shape the virtual environment, and facilitate economic transactions. This study introduces a novel feature to the metaverse by capturing a fundamental aspect of individuals–their conversations–and transforming them into digital assets. It utilizes natural language processing and machine learning methods to extract a key sentence from user conversations and matches them with emojis that reflect their sentiments. The selected sentence, which encapsulates the essence of the user’s statements, is then transformed into digital art through a generative visual model. This digital artwork is transformed into a non-Fungible Token (NFT), becoming a valuable digital asset within the blockchain ecosystem that is ideal for integration into metaverse applications. Our aim is that the management of personality traits as digital assets will foster individual uniqueness, enrich user experiences, and facilitate more personalized services and interactions with both like-minded users and non-player characters, thereby enhancing the overall user journey.
Non-Fungible Tokens (or, for short, NFT) establish the ownership and the authenticity of digital assets. Regardless the high security levels provided by blockchain, are not excluded the cases where the ownership of a digital object may be claimed without proper rights. Fraud and copyright infringement should be prevented through the insurance of the authenticity and the integrity of a digital object associated with an NFT. In this work we consider the case of NFT images under the aspect of being susceptible to duplication, theft, tampering, fraud, or in general any potential threat against their authenticity and integrity properties. To deal with such cases we propose an integrated system that provides an a priori embedding of authenticity and integrity related information by deploying robust authenticity information hiding in the frequency domain alongside fragile integrity information hiding in the spatial domain before the image is being publicly available as NFT. Moreover, an automated secure procedure for the development of smart contracts alongside the development of an NFT dual that serves as backup and is not publicly available through the marketplace is proposed in order to retain the initial digital image. We design a modular architecture that incorporates all the components proposed in this work and discuss its potentials on its deployment over different digital objects that can be considered as NFTs.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Digitalization has led to new investments in information including advance administration, storage, and gathering of corporate information. Blockchain technology has enabled this basic change, and it is becoming a feasible way to manage digital assets in various areas. These assets have enormous value and can be traded in a separate market from traditional assets. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a prime example of this progress. NFTs have created a data-based digital asset market and are safely kept on blockchain network. Unlike fungible digital assets, NFTs are irreplaceable. Gaming, health care, real estate, metaverse and finance could benefit from it. NFTs are more than just digital files and can be crucial to digital finance and its integration in BFSI is evolving due to blockchain and cryptocurrency. NFTs have fundamental obstacles that must be solved before they are accepted. Usability, privacy, governance, security, extensibility, environmental effect and intellectual property are some challenges faced by NFTs. This study explores the opportunities and challenges created by NFTs.
Artists are digitally disenfranchised, rampant online sharing and ease of copying make protecting their work from unauthorized use an uphill battle. Digital art is effortlessly duplicated, shared, and manipulated without credit or compensation, even leading to individuals profiting off stolen work. This widespread issue, particularly plaguing social media, demands a solution. We propose a blockchain-based platform utilizing Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to empower artists. By creating NFTs for their art, they claim irrefutable ownership, authenticity, and copyright, enabling secure sales via cryptocurrencies and combating unauthorized use. This innovative approach empowers artists to thrive in the digital age
Open access
Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Gang Kou, Hasan Dınçer, Dragan Pamučar, Serhat Yüksel · 7 authors
Necessary improvements should be made to increase the effectiveness of non-fungible tokens on the Metaverse platform without having extra costs. For the purpose of handing this process more efficiently, there is a need to determine the most important factors for a more successful integration of non-fungible tokens into this platform. Accordingly, this study aims to determine the appropriate the identity management choices of non-fungible tokens in the Metaverse. There are three different stages in the proposed novel fuzzy decision-making model. The first stage includes prioritizing the expert choices with artificial intelligence-based decision-making methodology. Secondly, the criteria sets for managing non-fungible tokens are weighted by using Quantum picture fuzzy rough sets-based M-SWARA methodology. Finally, the identity management choices regarding non-fungible tokens in the Metaverse are ranked with Quantum picture fuzzy rough sets oriented VIKOR. The main contribution of this study is that artificial intelligence methodology is integrated to the fuzzy decision-making modelling to differentiate the experts. With the help of this situation, it can be possible to create clusters for the experts. Hence, the opinions of experts outside this group may be excluded from the scope. It has been determined that security must be ensured first to increase the use of non-fungible tokens on the Metaverse platform. Similarly, technological infrastructure must also be sufficient to achieve this objective. Moreover, biometrics for unique identification has the best ranking performance among the alternatives. Privacy with authentication plays also critical role for the effectiveness of this process.
Joaquín Cerdá Boluda, Marta C. Mora, Nuria Lloret, Stefano Scarani · 5 authors
The emergence of the Metaverse is raising important questions in the field of human-machine interaction that must be addressed for a successful implementation of the new paradigm. Therefore, the exploration and integration of both technology and human interaction within this new framework are needed. This paper describes an innovative and technically viable proposal for virtual shopping in the fashion field. Virtual hands directly scanned from the real world have been integrated, after a retopology process, in a virtual environment created for the Metaverse, and have been integrated with digital nails. Human interaction with the Metaverse has been carried out through the acquisition of the real posture of the user's hands using an infrared-based sensor and mapping it in its virtualized version, achieving natural identification. The technique has been successfully tested in an immersive shopping experience with the Meta Quest 2 headset as a pilot project, where a transactions mechanism based on the blockchain technology (non-fungible tokens, NFTs) has allowed for the development of a feasible solution for massive audiences. The consumers' reactions were extremely positive, with a total of 250 in-person participants and 120 remote accesses to the Metaverse. Very interesting technical guidelines are raised in this project, the resolution of which may be useful for future implementations.
Abstract The multidisciplinary artist duo LoVid have been making art that combines analog and digital media, as well as handmade and code-based methods, for nearly a quarter century. Topics discussed in this interview include image processing, generative art, Web3, and sociality in contemporary media art.
Videos and image processing have significantly transformed computer vision, enabling computers to analyze, and manipulate visual data. The proliferation of cameras and IR equipment has facilitated the collection of valuable information about individuals and their surroundings. These technologies find applications in various domains, ranging from biometric entry cards and high-security clearances to surveillance. These applications form part of the Internet of Things (IoT), forming a centralized network. However, the proliferation of data and its sharing brings challenges related to security, privacy, and storage. Interactions with third-party systems may introduce vulnerabilities. To address these issues, researchers in computer vision have explored the integration of blockchain technology into various applications. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of blockchain applications in computer vision, focusing on image and video data sharing, video surveillance, biometrics, and video integrity protection. The aim is to explore how the blockchain can enhance the security, privacy, and authentication of them. It also discusses tools and techniques employed at the edge to achieve these objectives while highlighting opportunities for further improvements. Overall, this review provides insights into the integration of blockchain and computer vision, advancements, challenges, and future directions in leveraging image and video data in a blockchain-enabled environment.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology has evolved drastically in recent years, with a wide range of applications in various industries, including robotics. This paper investigates how blockchain technology enhances visual homing in robotics, addressing challenges in navigation without relying on GPS or maps. By simplifying complexities and potential access issues, blockchain establishes an unchangeable data repository for critical information like landmarks and robot perspectives, enabling efficient data retrieval. The study explores blockchain integration into visual homing robotics, emphasizing two consensus algorithms- Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). The evaluation covers suitability, throughput, and latency, unveiling distinct strengths and limitations. PoW ensures high security and decentralization but requires substantial resources and faces scalability hurdles, while PoS offers energy efficiency with decentralization compromises. We utilize Gazebo to simulate the environment and a visual homing based Wide Area Visual Navigation (WAVN) algorithm implemented in ROS, effectively managing the navigation of multiple robots.
Yuhang Wang, Ying He, F. Richard Yu, Bin Song · 5 authors
The Metaverse offers a highly immersive virtual world where users interact with others and objects in real time through their avatars. The integration of Internet of Things (loT) devices plays a pivotal role in achieving seamless synchronization between these two realms. In this article, we explore the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for image capture and data transmission to base stations, which then render and optimize images to construct the Metaverse. Considering the limited resources, when the communication or storage resources of base stations are insufficient, UAV tasks can be offloaded to the Web3 cloud servers for storage and processing, so as to avoid wasting the information collected by UAVs. This continuous interaction among the Web3 cloud servers, UAVs, and base stations enables the real world and Metaverse updating simultaneously. To enhance the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce a quantum collective reinforcement learning method, which empowers UAVs with fast training capabilities. This collective learning enables UAVs to autonomously adapt and swiftly respond to novel scenarios, thereby ensuring seamless integration with new environments. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of our proposed method in achieving efficient offloading and enhancing overall system performance within the Metaverse and Web3 ecosystem.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) revolutionize digital property rights and the representation of value. NFTs provide various digital assets with transparency, immutability, and traceability by leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracts. NFTs represent tangible assets digitally, bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds. Luxury brands such as BMW, Balenciaga, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci use NFTs in the metaverse to facilitate distinct brand experiences and expression. NFTs authenticate digital identities and property in virtual environments, thereby promoting self-expression and social interactions. They establish a new economic paradigm, facilitating the exchange of value across domains and the preservation of intellectual property. Scalability, sustainability, and legal issues present themselves, necessitating solutions such as layer-2 scaling and copyright protection. It is essential for platforms, creators, and regulators to collaborate in order to establish standards and frameworks.
Kasun Moolika Gedara, Minh Nguyen, Weiqi Yan, Xue Jun Li
In this paper, we explore video blockchain for establishing connectivity among vehicles in a smart city through utilizing blockchain technology. By leveraging intelligent vehicular systems that provide location-based visualization through multiple deployed cameras in vehicles, we expand the scope of collecting video surveillance data for observation, thereby enhancing overall situational awareness. We utilize the decentralized nature of blockchain to implement a vehicle-based surveillance system across a smart city. To ensure reliability, the integration of two cryptographic functions, hashing and signing, with the blockchain is employed. This integration ensures secure and tamper-proof solutions for the existing intelligent surveillance system. In this paper, our primary focus is on combining blockchain technology to achieve sustainable and robust smart solutions for intelligent vehicular distributed video networks while eliminating the need for third-party intermediaries. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed video blockchain approach. The results indicate that this innovative framework provides enhanced security, privacy, and scalability for intelligent vehicular distributed networks in smart cities, paving the way for a connected and efficient urban environment.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The blockchain network architecture is a promising technology for constructing highly secure Internet of Things (IoT) networks. IoT networks typically consist of many sensors and actuators. Blockchain network technology can be applied to secure control robots in smart factories or for reliable drone delivery in smart cities. The distributed ledger and data block validation across blockchain networks guarantee the ultimate data security. However, the current blockchain technology is restricted in terms of its overall deployment across IoT networks. A general permissionless blockchain technology typically targets high-performance network nodes with sufficient computing power and memory space. A blockchain node with less computing power and memory, such as an IoT sensor or actuator, cannot employ blockchain technology as a fully functional node. A lightweight blockchain provides practical blockchain availability to IoT networks. We propose an operational advance to develop a lightweight blockchain for IoT networks. The opportunistic block validation optimizes the block validation process. It measures the network vulnerability based on the node reputation, block validation degree, number of fraudulent messages, and network stability. The reinforcement learning mechanism employed in the opportunistic block validation determines whether block validation is to be performed. Two separately developed reinforcement learning methods can increase the processing performance while maintaining the transaction data integrity. In addition, the proposed blockchain technology is easily implementable because it adopts a Hyperledger development environment. Directly embedding the proposed blockchain middleware platform in small computing devices proves the practicability of the proposed block validation mechanism.
Technology has become a fundamental part of our environment, yet the borders between the physical and virtual realms become even more blurred. The introduction of the Metaverse is one of the most recent and notable innovations. It, just as any other technological advances, adapts to evolution in user needs serving as a link between the real and digital realms. While people can buy goods and services with a certain currency in the physical realm, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are used for transactions in the Metaverse. NFT provides customers a certificate of ownership, which means that their virtual commodities or assets such as lands or objects cannot be replicated. They may also be used to represent social standing, just like tangible goods and services. It has become increasingly common to come across museums displaying artworks or artists who sell their artworks as Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on digital platforms such as Rarible, Mintable or OpenSea. This research discusses the 3D printability of NFTs and proposes a framework in order to create a hybrid experience for 3D printed NFT artworks. The results have shown that 3D printing of NFTs provided users/customers a hybrid experience in both realms, maintaining the artworks’ uniqueness and rarity, proof of ownership, as well as physical copies in hand. Moreover, the artists who were afraid of publicly displaying their artworks for the concern of being copied have created 3D printable designs that enabled them to easily and safely promote their designs to the public.
Shuai Wang, Hao Sheng, Yang Zhang, Da Yang · 6 authors
The rapid increase in the volume of video data generated from edges in the Industrial Internet of Things, opens up new possibilities for enhancing the application of video service. Multicamera multiobject tracking (MCMT) has always been a fundamental task in video surveillance or traffic control. However, the traditional MCMT methods are limited by the communication bottleneck and computation resources of the centralized curator, and suffer from security and privacy issues. In this article, we first design multicamera multihypothesis tracking (MC-MHT) framework to achieve real-time tracking performance among edge cameras. The complex association of objects is described by multiskip trees. The tracking task is well distributed to each camera. Then, we integrate multicamera tracking chain into MC-MHT to ensure security and trust. The state transition of targets in multicamera is illustrated from the perspective of blockchain transactions. The transactions are validated by an integrated tracking consensus to counter Byzantine behavior. Numerical results derived from real-world scenarios and CAMPUS dataset show that the proposed method achieves real-time performance (24–36 FPs) and 79.0–82.4 MOTA indicator, as well as reduces identity switch errors about 71% under Byzantine attack.
The current large blockchain systems (BTC Lightning network, Ethereum, etc.) are generally facing the problems of low persistence rates and high storage costs. Therefore, users tend to store single modal (textual) information on the existing blockchain systems. Inspired by semantic communication algorithms, this paper presents a new algorithm to solve the serious imbalance between textual and visual modals on blockchains. After semantic sampling of the original visual image, the resulting semantic text will be stored on the chain, and the end users can reconstruct a semantically similar image using the \textbf{R}elative \textbf{O}ptimal \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{I}sotope \textbf{S}election algorithm. Experiments on the DIV2K dataset show that the blockchain with our algorithm can achieve 430,000 times the storage capacity and 550,000 times the persistence rate for the original visual data with acceptable semantic information loss.
Abstract The indiscriminate distribution of a large number of unlicensed images through the Internet seriously harms the benefits of image owners, which prompts the study of image copyright protection solutions. Existing blockchain‐free solutions are limited to using centralized servers to store copyright information, leaving data vulnerable to being lost or tampered with by external attacks. Although the blockchain‐based image copyright protection solutions are capable of addressing the above problem, improvements are needed in choosing a suitable blockchain platform and supporting integrated copyright life cycle management. To this end, this paper designs a blockchain‐based reliable image copyright protection system named BB‐RICP using Hyperledger Fabric. For one thing, the adoption of Fabric mitigates the limitations of other blockchain platforms represented by Ethereum in terms of efficiency, economy, and availability. For another, BB‐RICP successes in achieving integrated copyright lifecycle management. In addition, BB‐RICP achieves enhanced applicability performance by firstly introducing GM algorithms recommended by Chinese national standard and adapting the more consortium blockchain‐oriented practical byzantine fault tolerance algorithm. Moreover, the adoption of spread spectrum watermarking brings convenience to users. Finally, Kubernetes is used to assist in the simulation of BB‐RICP to verify that users can operate reliably in the blockchain network.
Open access
2 source records
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques